Media comparisons with the devastating 2004 tsunami, which
claimed at least 220,000 lives in a dozen countries, including
Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand, have been one-sided
and politically motivated. A collective amnesia pervades the coverage:
no one wants to recall how Bush and other world leaders ignored
the tragedy for days, or the pitiful amounts of aid that were
offered. Nor has anyone bothered to point to the conditions of
poverty and distress that many of the victims still face.

A BBC article last December marking the third anniversary of
the disaster pointed out that 10,000 people in India’s Andaman
and Nicobar Islands remain homeless and survive on limited monthly
rations. In Sri Lanka, thousands are in a similar situation in
refugee camps. In Indonesia’s Aceh province, 20,000 houses
remain to be completed in the rebuilding program. Even where people
have been re-housed, many are without a livelihood and access
to proper services. More than three years later, a promised tsunami
warning system for Indian Ocean is yet to be fully tested and
operational.

Several commentators have berated the Burmese junta for placing
restrictions on international aid, while hailing the Indonesian
government’s response in 2004 as a model of responsibility.
Again the writers have conveniently ignored the fact that Jakarta
was just as reluctant to allow aid workers and foreign military
forces into Aceh, where the military was conducting a vicious
war of repression against separatist guerrillas. Far from displaying
any concern for the tsunami victims, the Indonesian military seized
the opportunity to press ahead with offensive operations.

There is no doubt that the Burmese regime is guilty of callous
indifference to the plight of cyclone victims, just as the governments
of Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India were in December 2004. That
is doubly true, however, for the US and other major powers, which
for all their professions of humanitarian concern, provide miniscule
amounts of aid relative to their GDPs and ruthlessly exploit natural
disasters in Asia and other backward regions of the world for
their own political ends. It is enough to note that to date the
US has offered just $3 million in assistance and the European
Union 3 million euros.

The purpose of such highly-publicised aid operations is not
to end the suffering of the poor, but to patch up them up and
put them back into the same desperate situation as before.

By K. Ratnayake

7 May 2008

Read the whole article on the World Socialist Web Site.

See also:

Bush administration moves to exploit Burma cyclone disaster